Google Glass does a great job acting as glance-able display for notifications and driving directions, but as developers push the hardware to its limits we’ll see entirely unique use cases. One such example is Skybox, an app for Google Glass that delivers an entirely unique experience for hockey fans.

The great thing about watching a hockey game in-person is the ability to participate in the moment. You’re able to cheer on your team, cringe as you hear the crunch of a body being checked into the glass, and witness every skate hit the ice from your own unique perspective. Unfortunately, sometimes that perspective is less than ideal. Keeping pace with the game on the ice can be a challenge, but more than that it is frequently difficult to see exactly which player did what. The benefits of a companion app for a live hockey event are perhaps greater than most other sports due to the nature of the game — with it’s fast pace and tiny puck — but making a fan look away from the ice and down at their phone would defeat the purpose of seeing a game live.

The Verizon Center in Washington D.C. is much more than a hockey arena for the Washington Captials. The arena is equipped to rapidly cut and process video recorded on the ice, making it available to the sportscasters who operate out of the facility. The editing team and the hardware required to host it all creates a scenario where content could be delivered to users who are inside the arena during the game. To explore this possibility as well as address a few unique challenges for fans watching any given game live at the arena, Skybox was created as a trial companion app designed to deliver a unique experience through Glass.

In its current form, Skybox for Glass is designed to offer a quick glance at everything that is happening in the game as it is happening. The score and stats on each player on both teams in real time offer a way to check in on your favorite players without ever looking away from the ice. Additionally, when someone scored you are notified through a fly in notification with details surrounding the play. The app also allows you to take and share photos from Glass, with a long term goal of embedding hashtags that are relevant to the game currently being watched. Most importantly, the app gives users the ability to watch highlight videos as they are being cut and edited by the Verizon Center.

Being able to see a video playback of an event that just happened at the arena you are sitting in may not seem like a big deal if you’ve never been to a hockey game. For those that have, knowing that you can play an event back through every camera that was currently pointed at the ice is an exciting idea. The app allows you to pick a camera angle and watch the highlight, then watch it again from another angle. This video is unique to the arena, because it is cut and hosted right there. In our tests of the app, most video highlights were available less than a minute after the action happened, making it perfect for reliving that score while the ice is being cleaned.

There’s more than a few challenges ahead for APX Labs, the creator of the Skybox app. The app is currently a great experience, but requires a modified version of Glass’ software to work. A Google Glass wearer can’t just walk in and try the app with their hardware, but that’s largely because this concept is still very much in an exploratory phase, according to APX Labs CTO Jay Kim.

Currently the Verizon Center is trying the app out with half a dozen Google Glass units with fans who come to the arena, allowing them to sit and use the app during the game. Outside of the arena the app is obviously useless, but so far the response has been quite positive so far. During a brief interview with Kim he commented that there had been very few users that were uncomfortable with the technology on their face, especially once they could see what the real time benefits were during the game.

Skybox opens the door to a significant and unexplored market for Glass, and exposes the technology to a segment of the population that might otherwise never consider the benefits of wearable technology. It’s a great starting point, and APX Labs is exactly the right company to approach the idea. The company’s experience with military head-up display (HUD) design and its recent efforts in Augmented Reality with Epson’s BT-100 and BT-200 wearable computers provide a breadth of experience delivering content in environments where it is important to balance information and the environment around you.

For Google Glass users, it demonstrates another potential environment where a wearable computer can deliver a completely unique user experience, and for the sports arenas themselves it provides and entirely new market for delivering totally unique content.